Neutral, non-partisan discourse about security issues created by terrorism.

Tag Archives: Immigration

In 2005, Tony Blankley, a conservative editor at the Washington Times, not the Washington Post, wrote a slim book that caused people to yell: Foul! Discriminatory! Inflammatory! I do not remember if he was a participant on the Sunday morning Mclaughlin Report at the time but I do remember his slight English accent and gracious manner. His political position was very much cutting edge on the far right side of the political spectrum. His book was described as “shocking”. He argued that it was the West’s last chance at survival because the European continent was to become Eurabia. He argued that the European continent would be overwhelmed by militant Islam, which would pose a greater threat to the United States than Nazi Germany. This, he argued, was the West’s last chance at survival. This was in 2005.

That was eleven years ago. We had lived thru the September 11 2001 attacks –a series of four coordinate attacks by an Islamic terrorist group that killed 2,996 people, injured over 6,000 and caused billions in property damage. Five years prior to the Blankley book, a book published in the Netherlands had claimed that multiculturalism had failed in that country. That author was viciously attacked, called a racist and bigot. It was against this background and with the then surge of Muslims into Europe, that Mr. Blankley envisioned a continent where Muslims outnumber non-Muslims.

What has happened in Europe? This is 2016, and we will take count in 5 days of the 9/11 attack. Is there a Eurabia? Have the Muslims assumed the mantel of ownership in Europe? Clearly the answer is “no” but with a very large warning asterisk. When one meshes a fine article by Abigail Esman for the IPT News and the work of Conrad Hackett, a demographer focusing on religion at Pew Research Center, we see the formation of a very disturbing trend on the European Continent and England. I had a colleague who was fond of saying: Yes, I have a phobia, but that doesn’t mean someone is not trying to kill me.

Phobia based reasoning, people claim, is not a rational method for discourse, but there is a factual trend unfolding before us that is more than disturbing for the present and the future. Let me explain.

In Britain, Poles constitute the largest number of foreign-born residents, and the Brexit referendum to leave the European Union has unleashed a wave of violent xenophobia. But it is the Muslim population in Western Europe and Great Britain that has caused the greatest amount of fear.

In France, Belgium, Germany, the UK and Netherlands there is mounting concern because of the ever increasing Muslim population. Germany and France have the greatest number of Muslims. In approximate numbers, Germany has 4.8 million Muslims or about 5.8 percent of its population. Germany has roughly the same number but constituting 7.5 percent of its population. The UK has 3 million Muslims or 4.8 percent of its population. Last, the Netherlands has only 1 million Muslims but 6 percent of its population.

When viewed as a whole, Europe’s total Muslim population has been increasing steadily and consistently from 4 percent in 1990 to 6% in 2010, and should reach well above 8 percent, because of the extreme violence now in play in the mid-East and the rush of immigration fleeing to Europe. In 2015 alone the number of refugees escaping to Europe pushed to an astounding 1.3 Million people. While in the small and progressive nation, Denmark, the more than 36,000 mostly Muslim asylums seekers who had arrived in the last year has created a backlash. Bo Lidegaard, a prominent Danish historian, as reported in the New York Times, voiced the issue most profoundly:” we are a multi-ethnic society. We are not and should never become a multicultural society.”

These numbers are a haze to digest. But important as they are, they create a troubling picture for the future. The Muslims who have endured extreme hardship and arrive in Europe are younger than all other people in Europe, and thus it is expected they will reproduce at a greater rate than their older European neighbors. In 2011, it was predicted that the world Muslim population will grow twice as fast as non-Muslim s over the next 20 years. They have the highest fertility rate well above replacement levels and, thus, become the fastest growing religion worldwide.

Within the last 15 months I have felt the increased tension while visiting in the UK and France. Taxi drivers, without request, are indicating which streets and cafés were bombed; there is a palpable tension and one feels the quiet sense of possible danger. Since my visit in January of 2015 to London, with a cancelled trip to France because of the bombings, over 275 have been killed at the hands of Islamic terrorists. The youth are racializing and communities across Europe are in the midst of heated discussion regarding the strict control of immigration, reviewing counterterrorism strategies, increased surveillance and tighter control of currency exchange that have provided clandestine help to the potential terrorist.

I have written previously of much needed programs to coordinate intelligence gathering and data within EU partners. And that has come to fruition. Most important, beside the regularly scheduled meetings of the EU partners which I have called for is the present sharing of databases pinpointing not just groups but individuals whose potential for terrorism is demonstrable.

With the intensity of the data and intelligence sharing process we are faced with the concerns for individual privacy and the ability to have sufficient resources to conduct the most crucial aspects of counterterrorism intrusion. There is also the necessity to appreciate the macro picture –considering the effect on the general well-being of the European population with the arrival of thousands of fleeing refugees. “What now that that Europe is close to its limit on accepting refugees,” EU President Donald Tusk (the former president of Poland) said on Sunday, 4 September, as he urged the international community to do more to step up resettlement of those seeking refuge.

Taking the problem one set further, a major consideration in Ms. Esman’s article is how to combat/prevent radicalizing of the non-terrorist persons within the prison populations by the terrorist in the next cell. Equally important in the total fight against terrorism is the aggressive surveillance of those places that advertise themselves as cultural or religious centers but serve yet another purpose. Too many years ago, Steve Emerson of IPT came to my home and showed Yigal Carmon (who was then the advisor to the PM of Israel and now the founder and president of MEMRI) and me the first cut of a documentary he produced that was to be shown on PBS-Television: “A Jihad in America”. You were taken—with the use of hidden cameras– into mosques across America that were openly utilized as recruiting and training grounds for future terrorists. I remember clearly when the video print came to an end, I sat silent and stunned. I could only mutter: Please play it again. I watched it three times before I was able to discuss its content. Today, I would not be shocked.

Looking at Europe from afar, from the safety of my home, what I see is in some quarters is a culture that evokes hate and fear. There is so much more fear in Europe and the UK than in the United States. And the reason is obvious. 9/11 has become a memory to most of us in this Country—almost a symbol with little or no personal pain; the terrorist attacks in Europe are in the present, unrelenting, personal and with no understanding why the locations or the persons chosen to be attacked are determined—other than, in some instances, mere convenience. There is no place to hide. And so the rapid influx into Europe, first gradual and now in torrents, of Muslims bringing their traditions, culture and religion create a sense of being overwhelmed.

There is no Eurabia today and maybe not tomorrow, but there will be a massive change in the complexity of Europe’s character in our lifetime as the flow of large numbers of people rush from the Mid- East to Europe. Some to merely escape violence and they will be content to find peace anywhere. There will be some who will seek to impose their lifestyle on their host nation—and there will be conflict; there will be some who come not to escape violence but to vent through violence their religious hatred toward their host.

It is unfortunate, but the terrorists will, in the short run, outpace their pursuers. It is unfortunate, in the macro world, that the process thru which these refugees must be processed and their acceptance into our community will require enhanced surveillance. This will require the surrender of some of those civil rights we cherish until we find a method that truly balances those rights with providing for our individual safety. Pragmatically that is possible. There is always a price – a price for living in an open multi-cultural society.

Blankley was right. This is the West’s last chance to maintain its heritage—but only if we do deal humanely with those who flee from violence. In the process of recognition we must accept the concepts of religious freedom and deal simultaneously and pragmatically with terrorism –in one integrated bundle. One must understand that these are not separate issues; each forms an important part of the mosaic that will keep the continent European and embracing. France cannot be only for the French and Muslims cannot superimpose their will on the French –their culture or heritage. The EU must be in lock-step, united in one common goal. We, in the United States, learned that lesson when 13 very independent states formed one union, no physical barriers, accepting of diverse religions, no competing tariffs, and one nation-wide set of legal principals — all embedded in what became our Constitution.

The Paris mass murder, followed by the kosher market killings in France, was long in the making and predictable. Pointing to the Mohammad cartoon creators as the evil targets was an excuse, a pretext, a smokescreen. Evidence: Only days later, ordinary civilians shopping in a supermarket, in a Jewish neighborhood, who did not draw images or defile Mohammad, were murdered with the same precision and brutality as those at Charlie.

We have just return from an aborted trip to Europe. The plans were to spend some time in London, a Chunnel ride to Paris and all the pleasantries in-between. Then, all conversation turned to the reasons for not continuing our trip. Not merely from those at home, but strangers in London and many from France.

Once the tension became almost tangible, I began to notice more closely those I came in contact with during the course of a day in London. Immediately, I noticed the accents of those about me as we wandered about London, from the theatre to dinner to shopping to walking in the streets and pubs. The accents were not those of a people whose home was London nor were they cockney nor even American but from lands not in close proximity to the United Kingdom.

In 2005, I read a book by the late Tony Blankley, then an editor at the Washington Times, whose book “The West’s Last Chance” in which he argued that if the West did not halt the slide of an ongoing Arab (Muslim) immigrant invasion, there would be a takeover of Europe, turning the continent into Eurabia. His thesis was that with the decline in population among ethnic Europeans, coupled with the surge in Muslim immigration, the demographics of the continent would see a Muslim majority by the end of the 21st Century. He alleged that “Europe’s forty to fifty year experiment with multiculturalism has been a dismal failure. While some Muslims have integrated, many have not. Indeed, growing numbers of Muslims in Europe do not want to integrate but to dominate.” He even had the “nerve” to allege, ten years ago, as “fact”, that “many European cities contain no-go zones in which ethnic Europeans, even armed police, dare not enter” with no blow-back until today. That claim, alleged today, has now produced a cry “outrage” and “slander” with threats of legal action even by the mayor of Paris.

The question today is where have all the Europeans gone?
While Germany and France have the largest Muslim populations among the European Union members, France, while having less in numbers than Germany, has a larger percentage of its population from that group of people. If you look at Europe over all, it is Russia with the largest in both total numbers and percentage of Muslims at about 14 million persons.

Tony Blankley was correct in 2005, when he predicted that the Muslim share of the population across the European continent had grown and will continue to grow at a significant rate and is expected to do so through 2030 to make up more than eight percent of Europe’s population. That is a lot of people with a great deal of extraordinary cohesion in family, cultural and economic ties. Its political potential then becomes enormous. That power converts into enormous ability to impose its cultural and religious persuasions upon the majority, because of its united drive and convictions. In certain regions, they have attempted to do just that.

Strangely enough, and I do not know how to account for this, the median age for all Europeans is older than the median age of all Muslims, and this too will morph into greater leadership roles across the continent. Today, the Muslim population across the EU is far greater than the thirteen million counted in 2005. In turn, the favorable opinion of immigration and the Muslims has turned from positive to negative. The anti-immigration feelings in France, German, England and Belgium have increased with the attacks in France and the attempted terrorist’s activities in Belgium in January 2015. In the UK in January 2015, the prime concern in the upcoming election is not the economy but immigration.

When you have forty percent of the population of Rotterdam being Muslim, and a survey, that is not new, found that sixty-one percent of British Muslims wanted sharia law; that 26 percent of British Muslims believe that they have had much too much integration into British society, and only seventy percent would report a fellow Muslim they believed to be a terrorist, you have a perfect scenario for an immense immigration backlash, violence and extreme terrorism.

One can argue that both England and the Continent did not heed the import of the threat terrorism of 2004, when there was the horrific Madrid train bombing in March, the Beslan, Russia massacre in September and the shocking assassination of Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam in November. For those who do not remember the Beslan massacre, it started on September 1 and lasted three days and involved 1100 hostages including 777 children, and ended with the death of 385 people. The terrorists were a group of Islamic separatists. So were those who committed the coordinate attacks on the London transportation system below and above ground.

What did the EU lean? Not very much. Immigration continued and with it and the porous borders that permitted the relocation of individuals who embedded themselves into society, quietly, slowly and steadily. Presently, there is the distinct possibility, without aggressive efforts to integrate and neutralize those who enjoy a position of safety, of the threat and escalation by an immigration population who believe in violence and whose political and religious demands exceed local custom and rationality.

There is another component to the violence/terrorism problem that creates additional and complex issues: anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism has always boiled below the surface in France, although vigorously condemned by the Government. Only four months ago, the German government began positing armed guards at synagogues. Chants of anti-Semitism are being heard in Germany that echoed the days of concentration camps. “Jew, Jew! Cowardly pig” is the chant. The victims in the January murders in France, those at the kosher market, were killed because they were Jews and had no connection to the Mohammed cartoons.

Steve Emmerson writes that a reporter (a non-Jew) in the Swedish city of Malmo experimented by walking through the city with a hidden camera to gage the level of anti-Semitism by wearing a skullcap normally worn by religious Jews. Aired on Swedish national television, he is shown being attacked and called “Jewish Satan”, while another called him a “Jewish shit”. In another portion of his video, he is shown being threatened by a gang of people who verbally abused him. Malmo “boasts” of the largest number of anti-Semites in Sweden and usually voiced by the Muslim population. With only 600 Jews left in the third largest city in in Sweden, with a population that has 20 percent of its residents Muslims, it is no wonder that the police have shown a tripling of anti-semitic attacks over the previous year.

In France at the end of World War II, anti-Semitism was vitriolic, and increased in intensity with those who denied the Holocaust. At the beginning of the 21st Century, there was a new element and that was with the Muslim immigration and the geopolitical alignment of the right with Palestine. Today, the President of France said those internet service providers who ignore anti-Semitic, holocaust-denial theories will be regarded as accomplices, and urged that penalties be imposed. And although the Jewish population in all of France is only one percent, they represent 51 percent of all racist attacks in the country.

One French minister has said a “France without Jews is not France”. But that remark without more will not stem the fear or reduce the number of persons fleeing that country. The exodus from France has doubled since the beginning of this year, and if there were to be a mass exodus one would see up to 600,000 Jews affected in a country with the largest Jewish population in Europe.

Tony Blankley was correct in 2005, but only partially. He did not see the major consequences of a non-integrated society in Europe. If counties fail to integrate a new culture, if an immigrant culture fails to integrate itself, if tolerance is neither buttressed nor taught, then answering the question of where have all the Europeans gone is simple: They have been overwhelmed by the birth rate of the immigrant population or violence or both, or departed to other lands. Eurabia?